In France and in the European colonies of North America, two revolutions were fought over the same French ideas and key battles were turned by French naval cannon.
The principal idea on the rise was equality, which turned out to offer catchy slogans but few methods for governance. The ensuing chaos led to the rise of Napoleon in France; in post-revolution America, the same chaos produced only one strongman capable of pulling together all the important interests, the man who might have defeated George III to become George I if he cared to grasp for the main chance.
France’s return to autocracy as the newly minted United States continued to struggle with creating new democratic institutions could be explained by the “great man” theory or by economics or the peopling of the “new” continent might have created a politics sui generis. Some people point out the splendid equality of the guillotine, thought to be necessary to the French revolution but completely absent in North America.
In the Cherokee Nation, where I hold citizenship in addition to the U.S., you do not get to be an “elder” because you got old. It requires substantially more than age, and it’s not something you call yourself. It’s what others call you if they are so moved.
In addition to being born with a right to dual citizenship, I was born a writer. This is not intended as a boast. It’s a statement of fact, and it seems to me that winning some kind of genetic lottery is not an appropriate subject for a boast.
Like most Indian kids, I did not do well in public schools. After 10 years of misery, I was able to quit for good, leaving me with a 9th-grade education. If I had a buck for every time I was told I would never get a good job without a diploma I would have no need for a good job.
It would be futile to attempt a list of all the jobs I’ve had but it’s a useful cut to the chase to say I’ve had two careers. For 17 years, I was a trial court judge in Travis County, Texas. For the next 15 years, I was first an assistant professor at the University of Texas-San Antonio and then associate professor at Indiana University-Bloomington.
These were my personal revolutions. For all of those years, I harbored the intent to write a little memoir for kids from circumstances similar to my own.
Judges write and professors write a lot or they don’t get tenure. I was tenured twice. Then, since my kids were grown, I thought to cut out the middleman and try to be a freelance writer. The high point of that attempt was having the cover story in Newsweek on December 15, 2017.
As the year ticked over into 2018, I got a visitation that lit a fire under my determination to leave tracks for other dropouts with a memoir. My uninvited guest was cancer, and I dropped my third career to engage in a race with my own mortality to get the memoir done. It did not scare me at first because I figured the project would take six months, tops.
So I bumbled into the most difficult writing project I’ve seen in a lifetime of writing. I did not anticipate that writing of painful experiences would bring back the pain in such a vivid way. When I did finally finish, I ran into more trouble finding a publisher than I had ever experienced.
The “little memoir” is called Lighting the Fire: A Cherokee Journey From Dropout to Professor and it finally published on June 18, 2020 — right in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic. I still feel the project was important and equality was at the root of it.
How do you promote a book when all the normal methods — publishing parties, signings, speeches — are illegal, immoral, or both? Anything that might draw a crowd is forbidden. The reading public, like people generally, is easier to excite in a crowd. My only chance, I was told, was go online. The minimum would be my own website.
My trips to the hospital meant that I got no farther than a name, Cherokee Geezer. Too much of a geezer to learn web navigation on a part time basis, it turned out.
The cancer is at bay, thanks for asking, but it has left some very painful traces and I can no longer walk. Amazon is going to be the cheapest place to buy my book, because if you buy it defaced with my signature, you end up paying for shipping twice: from the publisher to me and from me to you. If you go to the Miniver Press website and order it, they fulfill orders through Amazon. I have ordered 100 author’s copies, which are being shipped slowly to save money from…you guessed it…Amazon.
It can’t be good for one corporation or one human being to control so much of how books get distributed. Jeff Bezos seems unlikely to abuse his power to control content (only market share) but the 800-pound gorilla of publishing will not always be Jeff Bezos.
We are in a better position than last week to know how that equality idea is going in the other direction, meaning who pays the bills for government. We know that before the alternative minimum tax kicked in, Mr. Trump paid $750. in 2016 and 2017.
The average taxpayer paid $12,200 in 2017; Mr. Biden paid $3,744,677; I paid $16,715. This is what can happen to taxpayers not as smart as Mr. Trump. They overlook, for example, a $70,000 deduction for hair styling. That’s more than I paid my barber, and she does the old straight razor/hot towel treatment.
Of course, if I were Mr. Trump, I’m not sure I would be interested in one of the hoi polloi wielding a straight razor near my throat. That would be almost as dangerous as Donald Trump near the Tax Code.
Equality still has a ways to go. Maybe we did better with liberty and fraternity? No? Blame the French! At least, in the 2020 elections, the U.S. has the American Napoleon on the ballot in the person of Donald John Trump. Our autocrat will be elected.
Or not.
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Previously Published on Medium
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